The writer Wolf Wondratschek's immortal opening sentence “The day began with a gunshot wound” could refer to the monumental main work in the Kunsthalle Mannheim. It shows Édouard Manet's “The Shooting of Emperor Maximilian” the execution of the unfortunate short-term emperor of Mexico in front of a gray courtyard wall. Reproductions of Manet's depiction of the brutal execution of an emperor and his generals went around the world and generated waves of indignation. The anti-colonial movement in Latin America received further fuel after Simón Bolívar. A good eighty years later, Picasso copied the picture with the rifle phalanx almost boring into the body for his painting of the Korean War,Only a few years ago Manet's fusilized Maximilian was still the subject of post-doctoral lectures at universities. But it is also the opening image of a show that demands a lot from its visitors: “Mindbombs”.
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the features section.
Follow I follow
Hardly any of the images to be seen, and especially the horror installations, can be washed off the retina without a trace or even quickly.
It simply reads too harmlessly when the Kunsthalle writes that “phenomena of extremism and terrorism are examined from the perspective of contemporary art”.
Basically, warning signs for adults should be set up before entering the show.
Instead, at the end there is a voting computer that displays approval or rejection.
How essential the questioning of “images of terrorism” or the asymmetrical explanation of terrorists is, is shown by the daily look in the newspaper or the daily news. Because the Instagramization of the world has turned everything into a picture and pictures can evoke emotions or even reactions up to war (Iraq's “atomic facilities” allegedly documented in the picture, Afghanistan's terror cells), terrorists blow up visually stunning twin towers and behead people in front of the camera. Globalized terror has long since established itself as a permanent producer of news images, which means a vicious circle for visual media such as television and the Internet - but ultimately also for artists, because they too run the risk of amplifying them in the reproduction of terrorist images.The machine guns built by Francis Alÿs himself and posted in front of the “shooting of Kaiser Maximilian” in Mannheim, on which film reels are mounted instead of the usual round drum magazine, in a first step to those baptized after its inventor at the latest, and so on, refer to this immediately personalized "Awtomat Kalaschnikowa" (vulgo AK-47) the iconization of killing machines, which is found as a stylized silhouette in national coats of arms such as that of Mozambique, Zimbabwe or East Timur. By calling his picture pistols “Camguns”, Alÿs not only contains the English acronym for camera, but also the pornography of these images of killing, which perversely arouse not a few viewers.
Within such a critique of visual violence, Almut Linde has set up her “Bullet Actionpainting” as a morally contaminated Minimal Art à la Donald Judd, in which centimeter-thick aluminum plates are expressively and incredibly decoratively torn by the latest craze in ammunition technology.